Probably Inevitable by Matthew Tierney

Author:Matthew Tierney
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Coach House Books
Published: 2012-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

Regular Folks

Going Bananas

What’s it been? Four days,

four solid-colour ties in shades of grey,

your expression coached to an innocence

consistent with your attorney’s

alternate theory of the crime. Now and then

I notice you flag under the strain of such phlegm –

you know me as juror number nine.

Number ten’s nodding off again, eyeframes

on a saliva-white string looped nape to bosom.

My leg’s racketing a heel in rhythm

to second-per-second flow of the dreamable;

on my pad I doodle a time machine:

knob and tube, dual exhaust, Barcalounger.

Walkie-talkie com system,

weigh-scale antipendulum drive.

Counsel and the aggrieved continue to

agreeably disagree, every other statement held up

like stained glass to the actionable past

in a rundown of testimony from MM/DD/YY.

Court reporter, jam-eyed,

setting upon the stenotype as though rappelling a cliff,

judge humped with news of a month to live

while tumbleweeds of O2

trip a saturation level near minimum

for us civil twelve to reckon reasonable doubt.

Counterfactuals pile up like cornflakes pile up

like models of megamolecules, a witness pointing out

you wouldn’t’ve candlesticked anyone

in kitchen, study or Kensington co-op

if the rage never ‘occurred.’

Number six, our foreperson (self-appointed),

a grade-school teacher punchy with the week’s pass,

records it all with bubblewrap script

on double-lined notepaper, your certain guilt

the keel that keeps her lungs afloat.

Sorry for that.

Sorry to get hopped up on danish and OJ in breakroom

and whang stereotypes around.

You’d twirl your pencil stash to hear how fast

we brachiate from if to hell yeah.

Bemoaning the long hours, we’ll punish you

for what we’ve more or less lost.

So trust me, I’m onside when your attorney,

an afternoon into appealing for discovery

of new facts, stumbles on the grandfather paradox

as an airtight defence. If you did arc the hammer

into your good neighbour’s jaw

and subsequently robbed Peter to pay Paul,

how could Spock ever have been born

to cover that tune? Humming all over this la-a-and,

I return to the present, mildly hypoxic,

staggered with mistrials.

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